How to Get Fast-Loading, Fantastic-Looking Product Photos

The addition of these images to your online store can cost you. For every large image or media file that you upload to a product page loading time is increased. Your customers, no matter how interested they may be, aren't willing to wait long for very long.

The most frequent question that store owners are faced with is: How do I accelerate image loading speed and still maintain a stunning appearance? It might sound like a challenge, but there's actually quite a couple of simple methods to ensure that you balance fast product photos and fantastic images.

First, let's have a look at why site speed matters. In the next section, we'll discuss the ways you can decrease the load time of your product photos while preserving their quality.

How fast your site's speed is crucial (hint that it's not only about SEO)

There are many reasons for why loading speedy images of products is equally crucial as having beautiful ones. The reason that many store owners think of first concerns search engines.

It's true that faster sites will perform better when it comes to search results, but regardless of other factors. Also, the higher up you are in search results, the more organic search traffic you'll drive to your website. But SEO isn't the only reason that speed is important. Google only made speed a ranking factor in the first place in order to prioritize User Experience (UX) on the web.

What it boils in the end: shoppers don't want to wait. They don't want to wait for shipments They don't wish to sit around waiting for answers or answers, and certainly do not want to wait for your store to load. So if you offer your potential customers a slow, laggy website what will that say about their overall experience with you?

So while large image files can slow down loading pages which can harm search engine optimization, these slow pages could also -- and more crucially, they can annoy the people who visit your site. And that's why it's so crucial to find that perfect the right balance between speed and beauty.

In this way, let's move on to the methods you can use to reduce the size of your images smaller while preserving their quality.

Save images to WebP or JPEG size unless you require transparency

The general consensus is that WebP should be your first preferred format, with JPEG as a second option in case you require transparency for some reason. In the event that transparency is needed it is recommended to choose transparent PNG.

Other formats are larger or less convenient for online compression. While you may be inclined to put an humorous animated GIF on your website's product pages it's best to reconsider. The cost of loading isn't worth the quick laugh your shoppers might have.

We'll look at the size of the files for this picture of an iced tea cup on white backgrounds when saved in some of the popular image formats. There was no compression of the image in this image. These are the only dimensions of the file that were saved when the image was in 1280x853 pixels, at the full resolution.

It is evident that the most compact file format is WebP format, which is followed by JPEG in a close third. The largest size file format is in the TIF the file type. It is estimated that the GIF file is nearly twice the size of a WebP file. If this was an animated GIF the file would be more than twice as large.

Images not only save in different sizes and at their best quality, but they possess distinct compression capabilities and compression capabilities. After performing optimization of image files for each of these images in Photoshop with settings that resulted with images that were similar in to their visual quality, the following were the results:

The WebP image again saved to the smallest file size -which was by a wide margin. The JPEG was also able to reduce the size of its files by a significant amount. Its PNG did not have any savings in file size as the decrease in the file dimensions of GIF was not significant. Utilizing LZW compression of the TIFF image saved an enormous amount of file size as well, but the resulting file is still over 2.5x bigger than an uncompressed WebP image.

If you have thousands of files on your website You can observe how using compressed WebP or JPEG files would save you plenty of space, and make your image load times relatively rapid.

NOTE: AVIF is another image format that tends to be more compressible as WebP. While it has widespread support but it's not as widely supported as WebP. If you're using Adobe Photoshop to process pictures, you'll need install a plugin to allow you to view AVIF images and store them in AVIF format.

Make use of image compression for ready for web.

Customers want images of their products which are big, high detail-oriented, and can be zoomed into (if you've got an option to zoom on your website, that's). This is, thankfully, achievable by using images compression software.

A lot of these programs have become so powerful that an untrained eye is incapable of spotting the difference between uncompressed and compressed images.

Before compressing your pictures before compressing them, it is important to know what the largest file size is at which your images will appear. Mobile devices tend to use high-resolution displays that have higher pixels per inch than desktops, however HD displays are increasingly common on desktop.

There is a chance that an image with a width of 500px displaying in a 500px-wide space doesn't look that great and images with 1000px or 800px width looks better constrained to 500px on a retina desktop or smartphone display.

Play around with your image sizes to see where you can find the most balance to fit your product. Also, if you're offering a zoom feature for your product images You'll need to select bigger images than if you used thumbnails only.

Once you've decided the maximum size of your pixel will be, then you're able to proceed to convert your high-resolution product images to optimized, web-ready images.

Let's look at some of the programs that you can employ to make quick-loading images to your website.

Adobe Photoshop

If you're using every version Adobe Photoshop, there are various ways to save your pictures in format that is optimized for you. It is possible to use the Save As feature. Just make sure to alter your file name if you are saving it using the same format that the original file. It is also possible to make use of Export As or the old Save feature for Weboption (until the time it's removed from support).

Each option includes steps within the process of saving that let you adjust your settings to compress images. Each option will offer different features and capabilities.

• The only way to save is Save As. Save As will allow you to save an WebP file.
• The only two options, Export As as well as Save For Web let you modify the pixel size of your image in the process of saving. If you are using Save as then you'll have to resize your image to the size you'd like it to be to be in Photoshop in the beginning.
• The old Save for Web feature is the only option which will display the approximate time to load and resulting file size before exporting your image, allow users to alter the parameters for the animation loop on a GIF, and offer the option to choose what metadata to include or not in your image.

The rest of the options in all methods remain the same: choose whether or not to eliminate metadata, or embed the color profile of your choice, and adjust image quality (lossy as well as lossless).

Do you have no Photoshop? Don't worry: you can try one of these online tools

There aren't many people who have access to Photoshop, but that shouldn't hold you back. There are plenty of free online tools designed to reduce the size of your images.

Two of the top tools are Kraken Image Optimizer as well as ShortPixel. Both tools shrink your images to a surprisingly small size while still preserving quality.

After the software is done with the uploaded photos, you'll be able to save them and add them to your store.

Both of these applications' free versions come with some restrictions in terms of number of files and/or maximum file sizes that can be uploaded as well, which means it's somewhat more time-consuming in comparison to Photoshop or the paid versions. But it is free and if you do not have a huge store with hundreds of products, then this might work for you.

Using ? Change the WordPress settings or try using a plugin

There's a chance that you don't be aware that compressing images is an option included in WordPress. It compresses JPEG files to 82 percent of the size they were originally, but that might not suffice for websites that opt for huge high-detailed, detailed photos or huge galleries.

One option you have to manage this compression built into WordPress is to edit WordPress's functions.php file. This allows you to increase -- or decrease the amount of automatic compression, depending on what you like the level of automatic compression which occurs prior to your images hitting the Media Library.

Want an easier method? Try a plugin. ShortPixel comes with its own, which works for almost every file format including Apple's HEIC format so you can add images directly from your iPhone. With a free account, you will receive 100 credits every month.

Enable a content delivery network for your store

Even though modern Internet connections as well as improved hosting capabilities have sped up the time taken for a shopper to load your store, there can there be issues with connectivity. This can affect site load times, especially if your customer is located around the globe away from where your server is located.

Luckily, there's a method to improve speed for these files (and not just for those larger files, like photos of products or product photos, neither). A Content delivery network (CDN) displays stored content from servers physically close to visitors rather than content that is available on demand that is delivered from one location. It improves the user browsing experience for all customers.

With a CDN like Jetpack, cached (that is, not current-to-the-second) copies of your store will be shown to visitors. The visitors will also be able to access material from the CDN server that's closest to them. Both speeds down load times dramatically particularly for photos with large sizes and media files.

Together with compression, utilizing a CDN is an excellent method of serving product images very quickly, especially if you don't update your store on a frequent basis. Of course, if anything requires an urgent update, you can turn on the CDN off.

Other ways that to achieve balance that is fast and amazing

The ideas offered above are among the most meaningful things you can do to strike a balance with photos of your products that look nice and load swiftly. Here are other tips to keep in mind:

• Select white backgrounds. Generally speaking, the fewer shades an image has, the smaller the file size is. This is even more relevant when compression is in use and the color palette is further reduced.
• Remove unnecessary images of your product. Do you have photos of the shoes you're selling from ten different perspectives? It's probably best to reduce them to five and cut the duration of the loading process by half.
• load thumbnails first, and only bring up the full size on click. So, shoppers don't have to have to wait for bigger pictures.
• Lazy load images. Lazy loading images improves page speed by only loading images above the fold, and also loading additional images as users scroll to where they are at on the page. The Jetpack plugin does not just provide CDN functionality, but also lazy loading of images. Jetpack is also a host of various WordPress optimization tools that, while not necessarily directly linked to images, can boost speed and enhance the user experience.
• Strip irrelevant metadata. Depending on the nature of the image file, it could be storing a lot of information about metadata such as copyright keywords tags, geodata images, descriptions of the image, etc. In some cases you might want to preserve this data, but you can also save some file space by omitting the metadata when compressing your images.

Incredible product photos don't need to slow your website (or your buyers)

It might seem like the only way to have gorgeous images of your products is to settle for a sluggish store, or that the only way to speed up loading pages is to settle for tiny images that are compressed to a high degree. But we beg to differ.

With just a few improvements to the photos you sell, you can find the perfect balance between fast-loading and gorgeous-looking. Also, neither your website -- nor your shoppers should slow down.